Huw Edwards was insecure because he didn’t get into Oxford? What self-pitying nonsense

Having a chip on your shoulder about Oxbridge is weird – and about 50 years out of date

The decline and fall of Huw Edwards keeps getting darker and more bizarre. Here was the BBC’s top-paid news anchor, a man so trusted it was he who donned a black tie to inform us of Queen Elizabeth’s death; he was the face of elections and wars – of Auntie Beeb, the UK’s anchor in moments of crisis. It’s hard to think of anyone more synonymous with respectability and the British Establishment.
Yet, behind that façade of uber-decency was not just a fraud but a predator. A paedophile who gleefully downloaded unspeakable images of child abuse, of a boy as young as seven being sexually violated. Reading through the court reports of the 41 WhatsApp messages Edwards sent to the “friend” whom he paid £1,500 to keep sending the vile pictures, the establishment stalwart is all enthusiasm. “Go on,” he responds to a message offering him “young” content, rewarding the sender not just with cash but flashy trainers and a day out.  
What was he thinking? This man who was the face of probity. As a journalist, he knew better than most that viewing such images is a crime because the photographs are evidence of criminal abuse taking place. The images are the reason for the abuse. I don’t understand why Edwards wasn’t sent to prison. 
So did Huw Edwards apologise for his vile behaviour? Did he take advantage of the media scrum outside the court to sob, “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”? Nope. Instead Edwards sought to explain his abhorrent behaviour – by saying he had “endured a difficult relationship with his ‘monstrous’ father and suffered low self-esteem after failing to get into Oxford and going to Cardiff University instead.” (The Oxford bit was specially pointed to by the judge). Um. What? There are many men who had monstrous fathers who don’t look at seven-year-olds being abused. But what strikes me as particularly peculiar – especially since this trial is of one of the most successful, famous, powerful men in the country – is him invoking “low self-esteem” because he didn’t get into Oxford.
Edwards is 63, it is over four decades since he failed to get into Oxbridge and it didn’t exactly hold him back. There are thousands of Oxford graduates who have been way less successful than Huw Edwards; he had about the most stellar career of any journalist of his generation. Going to Cardiff (which has an excellent journalism school, I have been one of their external examiners) wasn’t exactly a hardship. Why was it even mentioned? Has Huw still got a chip on his shoulder about it? Can he still feel like an outsider, like someone who “didn’t make the grade” even 40 years later after failing the test? Even when he has been so uber successful on every possible career metric?
It’s such a weird phenomenon, the Oxbridge failure chip – as if going to Oxford or Cambridge is the defining feature of your life, rather than what you do after it. I’m glad to say that in the current generation, the pull of Oxbridge is waning. I know several young people who have got in and chosen to go somewhere else, because the course was better. There are all sorts of other universities now which are more prestigious for particular subjects than Oxbridge: Bath for mechanical engineering or the LSE for science and economics, or the University of St Andrews, which recently trumped both Oxford and Cambridge in one of those top-university lists. Many British kids in the days of high fees are choosing to go to America instead (and not just rich ones – US universities offer incredible bursaries to bright students without necessary funds).
The obsession with having spent undergraduate years in a yellow-stone quad, that not doing so makes someone somehow “lesser”, is nuts. It’s about 50 years out of date. The Britain where all the power brokers were what I call “quadro-peds” – chaps who went to a public school with a quad, a university with a quad and often ended up in a job with a quad (in, say, the Inns of Court or Houses of Parliament) – think Jacob Rees Mogg – is thankfully over.  
I’m glad that as a country we’ve got shot of that kind of wisteria-clad quad elitism, that we have a Deputy Prime Minister who parties in Ibiza and comes from a modest background. That we’ve a cabinet with the highest number of comprehensively educated ministers ever. That at the top of parliament, business and media, no one cares where you went to school or university, so long as you are good at your job (and a whizz on social media). 
This is meritocracy in action. Do you know where The Diary of a CEO entrepreneur Steven Bartlett was educated? Does it matter? (He dropped out of Manchester Met after a term.) Toffs I know now downgrade their accents and camouflage their poshness; they talk about having gone to school “near Slough” and woe betide a current Oxford student who lets on that their parents went there too. That is social annihilation. Today’s Britain is all about having made it on your own merits; nepo baby is a term of scorn.
Ironically, in some ways Edwards’s elevation to the top of the BBC with his Welsh accent and regional provenance was a symbol that we were becoming a different kind of country. How sad that, despite his very presence being evidence of changing social mores, he was being eaten up by out-of-date educational snobbery.
Oxford is beautiful. Its colleges are national treasures; its teaching, fantastic. But it is not the be-all and end-all. And the kind of country which had such a narrow funnel to power, where the in-club was so small it was established by an academic test at 18, is thankfully no more.
That Huw Edwards was misguided, that he had poor judgement, that inside him was a gaping hole, which no amount of external achievement could fill, is now painfully obvious to everyone. This obsession with Oxford is a telling, pathetic detail in the downfall of a man who had it all, didn’t know it, and threw it all away. 
Often the very demons that propel people to give their career everything, which take them to the top – the need to prove themselves, the desire to “show” someone (often a parent) – are also the forces that take them down. Huw-bris indeed.